Title	THE VOLKSWAGEN GIF DEALER
Brand	VOLKSWAGEN
Product/Service	CARS
Category	E08. Community Building & Management
Entrant	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Idea Creation	DDB BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Jolien Elegeert	DDB BRUSSELS	Art director

Background

o Situation: The Belgian Facebook page of Volkswagen has more than 190.000 followers. Each day we interact with more than 1000 of them. They send us personal messages, like, comment or share the content we create and don’t hesitate to express their unfiltered love & hate about the brand with us. o Brief: Help us interact with all these comments, both the loving ones and the hating ones, in the Volkswagen way: make it fun and make it human. We want to act as a person instead of a distant brand. o Objectives: Succes would be measured in two ways: - Increase the engagement on our Facebook page. If we become more active, we want our audience to be more active as well. - Improve the tonality of the conversations on our Facebook page from rather negative to positive. Help the lovers outshine the haters.

Describe the strategy

o Data gathering: We have around 4657 comments per month. +/-30% of them are negative. o Target audience: - Those already interacting with us: through sharing love/hate they act as a spokesperson towards their own Facebook friends who see their interactions appear in their own feed. - The lurkers: those who follow us, watch a post appear, but don’t interact. How can we get them involved? o Relevance to platform GIFs are the language of the internet. 300million people share 2 billion GIFs every day. Demonstrating how widespread GIFs have become as a tool of quickly expressing feelings. So perfect to use on Facebook where the most interaction with our fan base takes place. o Approach Based on the comment we implement 1 of the more than 100 fun GIFs from our own database. Creating a fun tension, making a situation funnier or dealing with negative comments the positive way.

Describe the execution

o Implementation: We created a database of +100 branded GIFs to illustrate every possible emotion a community manager could encounter during a conversation with our followers. To keep the branding-aspect light and focus on the human aspect, we chose to use a ‘Volkswagen dealer’. Based on the comment we implemented 1 of the GIFs. Creating a fun tension, making a situation even funnier or dealing with negative comments the positive way. o Timeline: To kick off our new community management tool, we chose the Brussels Motor Show 2018 (January)- the biggest momentum for the automotive industry and the time social media activity is booming and fan conversations on our page increases remarkably. The project is still ongoing. o Placement: All GIFs were shared as replies to comments on our Facebook page. o Scale: The Belgian Facebook page of Volkswagen has around 190.000 followers. Each day we interact with around 1000.

List the results

o Reach: The Belgian Facebook page of Volkswagen has more than 190.000 followers. Each day we interact with more than 1000 of them. But we also reach the lurkers. o Engagement: - The average engagement rate on the page increased with 0,5%. From 2,2% in 2017 to 2,7% in the first 6 months of 2018. - Interactions on our conversations increased with 150% compared to conversations that didn’t have GIFs in the months before. - The mood and tonality of our conversations switched from rather negative to positive in less than a month. o Sales: This campaign wasn't meant to increase sales but to reinforce the ‘relationship’ between the brand and its community. o Business targets: The project was created to increase the brand’s loyalty and strengthen the relationship between the brand and its fans, the Volkswagen way: fun, witty and human.